New Media Prof Blog » Flying

Credibility

admin — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:23:42 +0000

Now here’s a word that gets bantied about lately. Credibility. It appears as if credibility is being questioned at every turn and we’re all trying to figure out how that happened all at once. We are questioning credibility in our government, large corporations and the people who run them, our economy, the stock market and some are even going to jail for abusing the appearance of credibility to the point of fraud. If you listen to Bernard Madoff’s victims, they were trusting individuals, all 4800 or so of them. From construction workers to highly educated people, you can watch their stories on CNN, read the letters they wrote to the judge, or listen to one victim’s story, the Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law, Lawrence R. Velvel on Lawyer2Lawyer this week. They all thought Madoff was credible. We all have a certain expectation of credibility with colleagues and business men and women in general. As a former TV journalist, I hold credibility as one of the most important attributes to protect. In the definition of credibility, two words are mentioned: trustworthiness and expertise. And this leads me to sharing a blog post written by Jill Geisler, who heads The Poynter Institute’s Leadership and Management Group, called Ten Reasons You Should Hire a Journalist. I couldn’t write it as well as Jill does and I feel a responsiblity to pass the word on so that some of my former colleagues and even journalists I don’t know, who have shared the responsbility of telling their community’s stories get a fair shake in the job market as many are being displaced. So give it a read and you’ll see what I mean. Journalists (most of them) have held high standards when it comes to crediblity and that’s worth a lot in these uncertain times. Even they may not know how valuable that is in the job market and in society in general.

Mobile Impact for New Media

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:34:05 +0000

Walk down a street in any major city in the world, and you ‘ll see everyone looking at their mobile. Even two people walking together – each will be looking at his/her own mobile device. It is truly a love/hate thing. According to comScore, the number of people using a mobile device to access news and information has doubled in the last year! And they say, 35% of us do this daily now. No surprise, really. Our cell phones are now the hub of our professional AND personal communications. I wanted to find out if anybody had landlines at home anymore…so I checked. According the the CDC (not sure why they’re studying this), three in ten adults have only a cellphone (no landline) and over 40% of 18-29 yr olds don’t have landlines at all. No doubt, we’re all becoming accustomed to being connected all the time with clients and global news as it happens. So the bottom line here is that new media is evolving and becoming more popular as quickly as technology will allow. More mobile usage…more new media…and more adoption by all. There is just more information available at our fingertips. I, personally see this as a good thing. We’ll have to suffer through some tough transitions, such as the newspapers morphing themselves into online-only newspapers and some won’t survive - that’s something we don’t like to see. Someone said to me the other day – ‘It is because no one reads the paper anymore’ – almost like our parents and grandparents used to say about walking to school…you remember the story. I read the NY Times everyday on my mobile, along with 5 other online versions of major metro newspapers. And it isn’t as though the 18-29 yr olds don’t want to read the paper, it is just that they don’t want to read the paper version with news that is often 8 hrs old! And so we shouldn’t lament the advantages technology allows us. We should embrace it…learn to manage it…and learn to put it down if we need to in order to have that balance. So go have a Guinness on this St. Patrick’s Day and check your email after you get home.

Spring Around the Corner…

admin — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:44:58 +0000

It has been a long, cold winter. Of course, I live in metro Boston, so it goes with the territory. But yesterday, the mercury crept up to 61-degrees and I went flying, reminding me that there IS light at the end of the tunnel. (Thanks are in order to my business partner, who has a beautiful Citabria – a joy to fly.) It seems as if we’ve been plodding along in winter, tending our businesses, clinging to our jobs, making ends meet or not and, trying to make sense of the economy, with hope in a new political administration that seems now to be just a new political administration. But now, as we move our clocks forward, the days are longer and the sunshine is brighter. The momentum is building, as corny as that might sound. The winter brought us one inspiring story of flight – that is of Captain Sully and the entire crew on Flight 1549 – grace and steadiness in the face of great obtacles. That story seems to take on a meaning – a memory of its own if you can see it. Another memory I always have had since I was 16 yrs old when I began flying, came from my Dad who unfortunately isn’t here to read this…and that is ‘never waste a day.’ He lived each day as a doctor (surgeon) trying to make it better for someone. And I think he was right, one person at a time. I apologize that there’s no New Media message in this post, but sometimes other thoughts prevail for a reason.

Sully, a pilot’s pilot

admin — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 19:39:20 +0000

Captain C.B. Sully Sullenberger has 227,730 fans on his facebook profile only two days after safely landing the Airbus 320 in the Hudson River. Bet he never thought any of this would happen. But who better to land that heavy iron so very gracefully on the water than Sully, the glider pilot. Our hats are off to him. Everybody will remember Sully. I had to laugh though when I saw on his profile “Captain C.B. Sully Sullenberger has no recent activity.”. No wonder.

Happy Ending

admin — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 19:09:43 +0000

My first post here has absolutely nothing to do with new media exactly. But it DOES have to do with a great story. You see, having been a journalist for over 20 years, I truly enjoy the story of the Hudson Miracle. It is not only the extraordinary angles of a catastrophe averted by the quick actions of a stellar pilot, Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III (Sully) and co-pilot, Jeffrey Skiles with the crew of the Airbus 320 and the 155 passengers who survived and their individual experiences, but also the contagious optimism the story has spread across America. Amid a peppering of bad economic news, joblessness on the rise, unrest in many pockets of the world, the threat of global terrorism and a mix of uncertainty yet hope for a new U.S. administration, this story has caught hold. We can’t get enough of it, from the praise of passengers for the incredible dead stick landing in the waters of the Hudson River, to the quick rescue by ferry boats that we all watched unfold while passengers clung to each other on the wings of Flight 1549. We’ve heard flashes of life itself almost stolen, told and retold by passengers who thought they would die and moments later knew they were alive. It is all good. You can watch the surveillance cameras that captured the actual landing and ferry response (this is the new media part). Sure, we’ll analyze the crash landing for months to come as I know from my experience as Executive Producer at CBS/Boston that we will, however we can revel in sharing this happy ending. From New York to California and all the places in between, we’ll remember this story of 2009.